Riding High on a Last Chance

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Bryan Beccia taking Ride On Curlin on an exercise run at Churchill Downs last week in preparation for the 140th Kentucky Derby. The horse earned a spot in the race by finishing second in the $1 million Arkansas Derby.CreditCreditMatthew Stockman/Getty Images

By Ryan Goldberg

May 5, 2014

A little more than a year ago, Billy Gowan, who had been training thoroughbreds for 20 years, suddenly found himself without a horse. At the Fair Grounds racetrack in New Orleans, one of his two horses had been bought in a claiming race and the other suffered a serious injury. So he went home to his family and small farm in Shepherdsville, Kentucky, not far from Churchill Downs — the home of the Kentucky Derby — and tried to gather a few horses.

He had a horse at a farm in central Florida, an unraced 2-year-old named Ride on Curlin who was going through his schooling. Gowan was receiving encouraging reports about him: “Hang in there,” he was told, “this is a nice horse.” It felt to Gowan, 48, like a last chance.

He had even started considering other jobs, applying for work at the Jim Beam bourbon factory and at a printing company in his town. “And I never got a phone call back,” he said. “But all I had on my résumé was stuff to do with horses and the racetrack. I guess that didn’t impress them.” Laughing, he added, “So I said, ‘I guess I’ll stay in racing.”’

He did just that, and last month Ride on Curlin finished second in the $1 million Arkansas Derby, earning his way into the field of the 140th running of the Kentucky Derby on Saturday. Which means that Gowan’s horse once waiting in the pipeline is about to complete one of the most unlikely trips to Louisville in the history of the famous race.

“It’s pretty wild how this game is,” Gowan said. “You can be down and out and not have anything, and the next year be in the Kentucky Derby.”

While many of the horses in the Derby field will be trained by men with dozens or even hundreds of horses and owners with millions of dollars to spend, Gowan will soon have seven horses in his Churchill Downs barn and Ride on Curlin’s owner, Dan Dougherty, owns three of them.

Dougherty, 55, who lives in Louisville, had been in the retail furniture business for 34 years until the financial crisis devastated his sector. He closed his two remaining stores last summer and liquidated the company.

“It’s been a good time that Ride on Curlin’s been doing so well,” Dougherty said.

Gowan, whose father is a veterinarian, grew up on a farm in Louisiana and, after earning a degree in animal science and then apprenticing with the Hall of Fame trainer Jack Van Berg, started training on his own in 1994. Like most rank-and-file trainers, he’s familiar with the struggle to make a living at it. His wife, a nurse, holds the family’s health insurance. The most horses he has trained at once is 14, generally those who make up claiming races, in which any owner can put in a claim to buy a horse in a particular race at a designated price. But he had never before had a horse like Ride on Curlin.

Gowan’s is a small, do-it-yourself operation, and Dougherty believes the personal attention afforded Ride on Curlin would never have been possible at a larger stable.

“I have done it all — when I first started I didn’t have anybody,” he said. “I had two horses. I would gallop ‘em, groom ‘em, hotwalk ‘em, I did it all by myself. So I know about horses and I know about training from doing it for so many years.”

He also knew how to pick out a horse when he finally had the resources. Gowan and Dougherty met six years ago. They claimed a few horses, but three years ago, Dougherty decided to spend more money on young horses. At the September yearling sale in 2012 at Keeneland, they paid $25,000 for Ride on Curlin.

In one of the final sessions of the 12-day sale, Dougherty and Gowan returned from lunch and a bay colt immediately caught Gowan’s eye. Time was short: He was about to go into the sales ring.

“He wasn’t the prettiest horse,” Dougherty recalled. “He wouldn’t win a beauty contest.” But Gowan told Dougherty that he had to buy this horse.

“He was a little toed-in and a little crooked,” Gowan admitted. “But I liked his body, he had good balance and was athletic. Then I looked at his pedigree.”

He was by Curlin, American horse of the year in 2007 and 2008, and from a female family that included the Grade 1 winner Victory Ride. A prominent owner, G. Watts Humphrey Jr., had bred him. Were it not for his physical imperfections, Ride on Curlin would have been offered earlier in the sale and for a significantly higher price.

Father and son turned out to be right. Ride on Curlin has proved to be sound and durable: Only one horse in the Kentucky Derby field — the favorite, California Chrome — has made more starts than his nine. In his second race as a 2-year-old, Ride on Curlin set a track record at Kentucky’s Ellis Park, and Gowan knew then that he had a special horse on his hands. In October, Gowan saddled Ride on Curlin to a third-place finish in the Grade 1 Champagne at Belmont Park, the first time he had ever raced in New York.

This year, he has finished in the money in four starts at Oaklawn Park, in Hot Springs, Arkansas. His earnings total more than $400,000, and Dougherty has reportedly turned down offers of $1 million for him.

Ride on Curlin has often been the victim of wide trips, and on Saturday he will be reunited with the jockey Calvin Borel, who has won the Derby three times and is famed for his daring rail-gliding rides.

With Ride on Curlin’s success, owners might be expected to be clamoring to send Gowan horses. But Gowan said that his phone hasn’t been ringing much.

“I guess they’re waiting to see if I win the Derby first,” he said, laughing. “You’d think they have to call then, wouldn’t you?”